Generally, the present invention relates to systems and methods for securities trading. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and method for automated securities trading.
Individuals trading securities often seek advice and guidance with regard to particular trades. Advice may be provided directly to the individuals by brokers, advisors, newsletters, or advisory services, for example. When using one or more of these sources of advice or guidance, the individual trading securities typically must first obtain the source of information and then determine and execute their own individual trade based on the information. Unfortunately, the amount of time this requires may result in a significant enough time lag to adversely impact the financial opportunity presented by the source of advice or guidance. Further, in today's fast-trading environment, a delay of seconds may be sufficient for a financial opportunity presented by a trade to significantly degrade.
On the other end of the spectrum from individual trading are pooled trading funds wherein the trades may be executed by someone other than the individual, such as by the manager of a hedge fund, for example. A specialized manager may have greater skill at securities trading than the individual and may thus be able to deliver more profitable trades than the individual may achieve on their own. However, with such managed funds, the individual owning the shares often does not have input or insight into the trading process and their ability to manage their own portfolio is extremely minimal.
The following description of certain embodiments will be better understood when read in conjunction with the appended drawings. For the purposes of illustration, certain embodiments are shown in the drawings. It should be understood, however, that the claims are not limited to the embodiments shown in the attached drawings.